"That is sheer lunacy!" I said. Brand laughed, and agreed.
"Idiotic in the face of plain facts, but that only shows, how strong is the belief of people in their own righteousness. I suppose even now most English people think the Boer war was just and holy. Certainly at the time we stoned all who thought otherwise. Yet the verdict of the whole world was against us. They regarded that war as the brutal aggression of a great Power upon a small and heroic people."
"But surely," I said, "a man like Franz von Kreuzenach admits the brutality of Germany in Belgium—the shooting of priests and civilians—the forced labour of girls—the smashing of machinery—and all the rest of it?"
Brand said that Franz von Kreuzenach deplored the "severity" of German acts, but blamed the code of war which justified such acts. It was not his view that Germans had behaved with exceptional brutality, but that war itself is a brutal way of argument. 'We must abolish war,' he says, 'not pretend to make it kind.' As far as that goes, I agree with him."
"How about poison gas, the Lusitania, the sinking of hospital ships, submarine warfare?"
Brand shrugged his shoulders.
"The German answer is always the same. War is war, and they were hard-pressed by our superiority in material, man-power and sea power. We were starving them to death with our blockade. They saw their children dying from disease, their old people carried to the grave, their men weakened. They had to break through somehow, anyhow, to save their race. I don't think we should have stopped at much if England had been ringed round with enemy ships and the kids were starving in Mayfair and Maida Vale, and every town and hamlet."
